With US support, Mexico responded, and the number
of undocumented Central Americans apprehended in Mexico rose by
71% between July 2014 and June 2015, compared the same period a
year prior, according to a report from the Washington Office on Latin
America.

Migrants
from Central America have traveled north through Chiapas and
other states on Mexico's southern border.Christopher Woody/Google Maps

Central American migrants detained in Mexico jumped to over
170,000 in 2015, up from about 78,000 in 2013, according to The New York Times. Most of
those caught, WOLA notes, are intercepted in Chiapas.

In Mexico, however, many of those migrants find more of the horror that forced them from
their homes.

"When you live in Honduras, you quickly learn that anywhere
and anything is better,” a 17-year-old migrant
told
The Dallas Morning News in summer 2014, “but then
you get to Mexico and you understand that hell extends beyond
Honduras."

'A permanent fear'

Pope Francis has spoken before about the plight of migrants
fleeing Central America. In July 2014, as child migrants arrived
at the US border, the pontiff said, “This humanitarian emergency requires,
as a first urgent measure, these children be welcomed and
protected.”

But his also zeroed in on a policy response to the migrant
crisis. “These measures, however, will not be sufficient, unless
they are accompanied by policies that inform people about the
dangers of such a journey,” he continued, according to the
Huffington Post.

“And, above all, [policies] that promote development in their
countries of origin,” he added.

The Catholic Church and related groups have also been involved in
Central America, including in San Salvador, the capital of El
Salvador, which saw a 72% increase in homicides in 2015.

“There is an urge to flee, because of the very asphyxiation that
people feel,” Verónica Reyna, a psychologist with a Catholic
Church-linked group in San Salvador, told The Wall Street Journal. “In El
Salvador, there is a constant paranoia, a permanent fear.”

Francis returned to the topic during his visit to the US in
September last year. “We must not be taken aback by their
numbers,” he said, referring to the migrants, “but rather
view them view them as persons, seeing their faces and listening
to their stories, trying to respond as best we can to their
situation.”

Women
and their children wait in line to register at the Honduran
Center for Returned Migrants after being deported from Mexico, in
San Pedro Sula, northern Honduras, June 20, 2014. Thousands of
young people are hoping to reach the US from their impoverished
and violent homes in Central America. In the eight months ended
June 15, the US has detained about 52,000 children at the Mexican
border, double the figure the year earlier.REUTERS/Jorge Cabrera

While the pope’s trip to Chiapas is sure to address that state’s
indigenous community, the poverty that afflicts it (76% of the
state lives in poverty, 32% in extreme poverty), and the alienation they
feel toward the church, he is also likely to touch on migrant
rights.

Amid the Mexican government’s crackdown on the stream of
migrants, any comments or gestures he makes about their plight is
likely to irk Mexico’s political leadership.

“It will be an uncomfortable visit,” Jesuit father David Velasco,
a professor in Guadalajara, told The Guardian in December, before
the pope’s itinerary had been announced. “The Mexican government
has a strategy of painting a fantasy of a country that doesn’t
exist,” he added.

Central
American migrants rest next to the train tracks while waiting for
the freight train "La Bestia", or the Beast, to travel to north
Mexico to reach and cross the US border, at Arriaga in the state
of Chiapas, January 10, 2012.REUTERS/Jorge Luis Plata

On Saturday, his first full day in the country, Francis addressed
those leaders directly.

“Experience teaches us that each time we seek the path of
privileges or benefits for a few to the detriment of the good of
all,” the pontiff said, according to the AP, “sooner or later
the life of society becomes a fertile soil for corruption, drug
trade, exclusion of different cultures, violence and also human
trafficking, kidnapping and death, bringing suffering and slowing
down development.”

Migrants
scuffle with riot police during their annual human rights protest
amidst a crackdown on Central American citizens crossing overland
towards the United States, in El Espinal, Oaxaca, April 15, 2015.
The writing on the cross reads "Enough of migrant's
blood".REUTERS/Jorge Luis
Plata

Like migrants fleeing Central America, Pope Francis will travel
north from Chiapas.

He will stop in Michoacan, a violence-wracked state in Mexico’s southwest,
where bloodthirsty gangs have terrorized the population.

His visit there will also likely mention the priests who, along
with residents, have stood up to criminals.

Those clergymen have paid the price, as the 40 of them killed
over the last decade have made Mexico the most dangerous country for priests in the
Americas, according to El Pais.

The pope’s trip will conclude on February 17 in Ciudad Juarez, the
northern border city that was, just a few years ago, the most
violence city in the world.

His visit is expected to help broadcast the city’s economic
and social recovery, but that fact that it’s a border
city links it to the broader migrant crisis.

A
child holding a flag waits for the arrival of Pope Francis
outside the Guadalupe's Basilica in Mexico City, February 13,
2016.Reuters

Though Pope Francis' current plans don't involve him traveling
into the US, the significance of that crossing has not been
lost on him.

“To enter the United States from the border with Mexico would be
a beautiful gesture of brotherhood and support for immigrants,”
he said early last year.